YouTube...

Post Reply New Topic

I recently watched this video from a content creator I've been subscribed to for many years and stuck by him through thick and thin.


It got me thinking about the trials and tribulations I've went through during my early years on YouTube. I started this channel https://www.youtube.com/user/MrIAMNOTANOOB way back in '09 (or was it '07?). My younger brother came up with the name. Still 217 subs despite me telling everyone to unsub and go home. All my work has been deleted and now it's a viewing channel these days. How did it come to this? My videos started out as mostly Garry's Mod stuff. I then decided to try doing Let's Plays using cheats as my go to for beating the game whatever it takes. My reasons were I can, I will, I like to, I want to, it's my thing, and I don't care what anyone says. Conformity was never really my thing and though there were rules among the community, just some dos and don'ts when doing Let's Plays, I still broke them and there were no consequences to punish me. The games I played ranged from my Steam library to whatever I had in roms at the time. For a couple of years, it was fun, but things started to stagnate. Back then, I dealt with a Windows Vista and a Windows XP with limited hardware so there was no way I could move upward in terms of covering more games. I tried to keep things going by adding Soundtracks and doing wrestling matches from WWE and WCW games on N64. Things soured however when I started getting copyright complaints. On YouTube, copyright complaints are a common problem especially since the system is broken and abusable. I was a perfectionist back then. If there was one Copyright claim on my video, I didn't feel like uploading until it was gone. If it was disputable, it would take a month which means no uploading for a WHOLE month. If it wasn't, I'd have to delete the video and make some edits before reuploading. It was a monthly basis and my Half-Life videos at the time were mostly the ones under attack. They really wanted to copyright claim the end credits theme and give the ad revenue to someone else. I remember going to these companies' channels and their introductory video was just them praising this abusable system because it works. When they kept coming back for what felt like the dozenth time, I threatened to contact Valve and for a time, they left me alone, but that didn't last forever. When I wasn't dealing with copyright, I was dealing with trolls and scammers. Just people I don't know sending me PMs praising my work and telling me to click some stupid link to raise my sub count. I kept telling them F*** OFF because I know they're not real people, but the bot doesn't care, it's programmed to keep trying and trying. What I would do for silence. I wished there was a way to close my channel off from unwanted contacts. No more personal messages! Then YouTube made it worse with their Google Plus update which allowed more and more a**holes to find me. On top of being a perfectionist who wanted quiet, I was also thinskinned. Despite a decent sub count, I had little to no traffic coming towards my videos. Whenever I got a dislike, I would disable the ratings. I had videos up that had one dislike and time would go by and nothing would change. It's not like the video itself was bad, but if people saw zero likes and that one dislike and nothing else, they wouldn't know that. Ratings were useless to me because of the low traffic. Then one day some random user asks if I could enable the ratings so he could like the video. The video in question was a track from Sonic 2. I came back and found an additional 11 dislikes. I opened my heart, gave 'em the benefit of the doubt, and this is the thanks I got. It didn't stop there, my latest video would receive 11 dislikes immediately after it was uploaded. After ratings were disabled on every video, the guy returned and asked Hey, what the Hell, man? I blocked him. I was done with bull**** I didn't want to take any chances. Fool me once, shame on you. There is no second try. This was right around '13 when my family was falling apart and we were in huge debt. YouTube was my escape, and each upload gave me a rush of euphoria to cope with how hard life is. I had just dropped out of college, my father was drinking more and more and arguing with my mother every night. If my viewers and subscribers knew what I was putting up with, would they have eased up? Probably not. I lost my faith in humanity in late '12 and my opinion has not changed. YouTube was becoming a chore rather than the fun hobby I used to love. The summer of '14 was approaching and things had been quiet for months. Another copyright company came and started claiming my Portal videos. This time it was different because they had recently at the time gotten the rights to the soundtrack and they had a pattern. They would claim one of my Portal videos a week until they were all claimed. Knowing my lack of desire to upload during an ongoing copyright battle, I did the math and I would be out of commission for quite a number of months. We were facing eviction due to our mortgage debt, and I couldn't take it anymore with YouTube. It was so broken, that I deleted everything. The stress of my family life and my YouTube life was combining and getting to me. And then when I tried to close down my channel for good, an error would always come up. It wouldn't let me go. I laughed in a fit of madness inside. After all I've been through, the site still wants me around. So I said fine, but I will never upload on this channel again.

Years later, YouTube alternatives started popping up. Sure, there were already some here and there, but they were very picky about Videogame content since there's so much of it and not enough server room. The ones in question were Zippcast and Vidme. I gave them a try by restarting my Let's Play hobby under a name that fits what I do. GodModeHeroes was the phoenix reborn from the ashes of MrIAMNOTANOOB. Still, it didn't last. We all know how those sites turned out. YouTube is such a juggernaut and advertisers were very picky. Damn the apocalypse and the idiot who wrote that Wall Street Journal article.

In the winter of '17, I came crawling back to YouTube, but I was wiser than I used to be. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCohGxt ... jhvB8NtrEQ
GodModeHeroes was here to stay and so far I'm uploading more and more with more diverse gaming content, BUT I have a lot less subs, stagnating growth, little to no traffic for recent uploads, ratings can't be disabled but they're not shown because they're still useless, and comments are locked down for three days after an upload to keep out the bots. Despite all that, I'm happier with this channel than I was with the old one and I've learned to tolerate copyright claims as long as the video isn't blocked in any territories. Five years since then and I'm surprised no one subbed from my old channel came to recognize me. Maybe it's better that way. Things are quiet now, my family is doing better, and I've got a newer PC. So where to from here? I'll just keep going. I have a lot of games to cover.

That's cool that you like to make make gaming videos. I like too also even though I get very little views. It's just something that's fun for me and keeps my mind off of negative things.

You are a very tallented person.